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18 DECEMBER 1910 * 16 NOVEMBER 2004
LEWIS H. VAN DUSEN JR. died on 16 November 2004, a month short of his ninety-fourth birthday. Four days later his family and many friends gathered in overflow numbers at the Church of St. Asaph in BaIa Cynwyd to celebrate not only his years of distinguished service to the legal profession and the many organizations to which he belonged, but also his qualities of exceptional intelligence, loyalty, and perseverance. He was, by every measure, an extraordinary man.
In conversation Lew had the uncanny ability to make connections, however remote in time or place those connections might at first blush strike his listener. This tribute will therefore begin, in pale imitation, by attempting to connect Lew with a resource he valued highly, his diverse and far-flung family. The Van Dusens trace their origins in America back to one Abraham Pietersen, a miller by trade, who with his wife left Holland for the New World in the early 163Os. Although this ancestor was a resident of Haarlem at the time of his emigration, he appears to have been born in Deursen, a small village in North Brabant, close to the present-day border with Belgium. Either in Holland or later in America, the surname was enlarged to Van Deursen and eventually through more than one permutation to Van Dusen.
A branch of the growing New York family came to Philadelphia in the middle of the eighteenth century. Lew's great-great-grandfather and great-grandfather were both active shipbuilders in Philadelphia. A particular distinction that Lew cherished about his lineage was that his grandfather, Joseph Ball Van Dusen, who would establish a successful coal company, was born in 1815. But rather than taking satisfaction in the end of hostilities between Great Britain and the United States achieved in that year, Lew chose to connect his grandfather's arrival on the scene with the Battle of Waterloo.
As a lifelong Anglophile, he had solid reason for making that choice. To complement the Dutch heritage on his father's side Lew could claim a British one on his mother's. Muriel Lund Van Dusen, the daughter of an officer in the Seaforth Highlanders, was born in Lucknow, India, where her father's regiment was stationed in the ongoing attempt to...